How should information be measured? That is the motivating question for this book. The concept of information has become so pervasive that people regularly refer to the present era as the Information Age. Information takes many forms: oral, written, visual, electronic, mechanical, electromagnetic, etc. Many recent inventions deal with the storage, transmission, and retrieval of information. From a mathematical point of view, the most basic problem for the field of information theory is how to measure information. In this book we consider the question: What are the most desirable properties for a measure of information to possess? These properties are then used to determine explicitly the most “natural” (i.e. the most useful and appropriate) forms for measures of information.This important and timely book presents a theory which is now essentially complete. The first book of its kind since 1975, it will bring the reader up to the current state of knowledge in this field.

How should information be measured? That is the motivating question for this book. The concept of information has become so pervasive that people regularly refer to the present era as the Information Age. Information takes many forms: oral, written, visual, electronic, mechanical, electromagnetic, etc. Many recent inventions deal with the storage, transmission, and retrieval of information. From a mathematical point of view, the most basic problem for the field of information theory is how to measure information. In this book we consider the question: What are the most desirable properties for a measure of information to possess? These properties are then used to determine explicitly the most “natural” (i.e. the most useful and appropriate) forms for measures of information.This important and timely book presents a theory which is now essentially complete. The first book of its kind since 1975, it will bring the reader up to the current state of knowledge in this field.